A house built on sand: Our house fiscal experts Scott Clark and Peter DeVries say the budget’s bottom line is based on a grab-bag of assumptions and questionable money movements that make the entire document an extended exercise in wishful thinking. “Harper’s government has not recorded a surplus in seven years, and with the current risks and uncertainties, it is very likely there won’t be a balanced budget this year.”

The budget is, of course, just the opening gun of the federal election campaign — a campaign in which the three main parties are struggling to break a polling deadlock. A new Forum Research poll says most Canadians support the idea of a coalition government if no party gains a majority in Parliament. “It appears that the idea of a coalition government isn’t the bogeyman to voters that the government would like us to believe,’’ said Lorne Bozinoff, president of Forum Research.

Ottawa is refusing to release a report on the death of a Canadian soldier in Iraq prepared by U.S.-led special forces, the Globe and Mail reports. Instead, the findings are being fed into two Canadian military investigations looking at the circumstances behind Sergeant Andrew Doiron’s death March 6 in northern Iraq. He was killed by Kurdish fighters in what the Canadian Armed Forces says was a “friendly fire” incident.

Shifting hundreds of RCMP officers to counterterrorism duty has hurt the national police force’s efforts to fight organized crime and espionage, a senior Mountie says. The resource challenge is “negatively impacting” the force’s ability to do everything it’s expected to do, says Mike Cabana, deputy RCMP commissioner for federal policing.

Recent polls are predicting a minority government as the outcome of Alberta’s election — and that, says Postmedia’s Don Braid, is ramping up talk of a coalition or merger between the governing Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose. “Squished in the middle, the Progressive Conservatives could find themselves in the mid-40 seat range in the legislature, or lower.”

A 93-year-old former Nazi SS guard, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, has admitted he is “morally” guilty. Oskar Groening spoke at the beginning of his trial for being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews at the concentration camp.

A cybersecurity expert was bounced from a recent United Airlines flight after tweeting about how easy it would be to use his laptop to hack into the aircraft’s systems in order to get the oxygen masks to drop. But aviation experts say he’s talking rot; the security protecting an aircraft’s controls from hackers is quite robust, the CBC reports. Otherwise, “Transport Canada and the (U.S. Federal Aviation Administration) wouldn’t be certifying these aircraft for use,” says Lynne McMullen, chair of the aviation school at Seneca College in Toronto.